Power, Violence, and the Paradox of Founding in John Ford’S the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: an Arendtian Approach Russell L
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Naveiñ Reet: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research (NNJLSR) No.6 2015, pp. 57-76 Power, Violence, and the Paradox of Founding in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: An Arendtian Approach Russell L. Dees Abstract John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is widely regarded as one of his best and darkest films and as a deep meditation on the American foundation myth. This article examines issues raised by John Ford’s film through distinctions Hannah Arendt developed between ‘power’ and ‘violence’ in her 1969 essay “On Violence” and through her analysis of foundation myths in her 1963 book On Revolution and places them in a broader context of political philosophy. Through this conceptual apparatus, we may gain new insight into the way John Ford’s film grapples with issues of law and politics. Moreover, the film provides concrete illustrations of some of the more abstract concepts in Hannah Arendt’s writings. Over the past decade or so, a growing number of scholars have recognized that the Western films of such directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and George Stevens offer serious meditations on issues of political philosophy. The American Western film is “an inherently political genre” (Brody 2013).1 Moreover, “the Western is the chief realisation of the American foundation myth” (Tait 2008). And one particular subgenre of the Western provides rich provender for contemplating the myth of foundations because it grapples with a ‘tragic’ confrontation of lifestyles – the classic conflict between so-called ‘cattlemen’ (who pioneered the land, cleared it of ‘hostile Indians’, and created a prosperous life for themselves on the ‘open range’) and so-called ‘sodbusters’ or homesteaders (who, thanks to the ‘taming’ of the wilderness, follow in the wake of the cattlemen to plow fields, put up fences, etc., all of which destroy the ‘open range’). This confrontation is depicted in such films as Elmer Clifton’s 1918 silent pictureWinner Takes All, George Stevens’ 1953 Shane, and Michael Cimino’s notorious 1980 Heaven’s Gate (testifying to its persistence as a theme). The irony in the subgenre is rich (the cattlemen, having stolen the land from the Native Americans, resent having it re-stolen by homesteaders), but it is usually implicit or unacknowledged in such films. 1 For a more general analysis of the ‘Western,’ see Slotkin 1993 with excellent analyses of John Ford’s films Stagecoach and The Searchers, among others. 58 Naveiñ Reet: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research (NNJLSR) No.6 2015 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)2 – widely-acclaimed as John Ford’s ‘final masterpiece’,3 although he directed several later films (including an ‘anti-Western’ Cheyenne Autumn) – is a prominent example of this subgenre. Along with The Searchers, it is generally regarded as one of Ford’s ‘darker’ films,4 which were made after the director’s experiences during World War II. The film is also widely recognized as a complex meditation on legal and political issues and has been analyzed from a variety of political and philosophical perspectives.5 I propose to examine some of the issues raised by the film through concepts developed by the political theorist Hannah Arendt in her book On Revolution (1963) and her 1969 essay “On Violence.” I do not mean to suggest any causal connection in either direction. Obviously, Arendt was writing On Revolution when John Ford’s film came out. Her work 2 The film is based on a short story by Dorothy M. Johnson, published in 1949. However, Ford deviated from the original plot in a number of ways that deepen and enrich themes touched on in the story. 3 For a sampling of the praise critics have had for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, see O’Neill 2004:472-73. Although the film was a success in 1962, critics have noted that it seems odd for a John Ford movie. For one thing, it is a very ‘meta’ film – a film about film. It references many of Ford’s earlier pictures. For example, the plot is practically the inverse of his 1946 My Darling Clem- entine in which Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp plays the marshal who brings law and order to the town of Tombstone (which the town of Shinbone echoes in Liberty Valance). It also re- calls Ford’s early Western, Stagecoach (1939), with John Wayne. Andy Devine (who plays the stagecoach driver in the early film and the ineffective marshal in Liberty Valance) is married to a Julietta in Stagecoach and has a daughter Julietta in Liberty Valance. John Wayne’s char- acter in both films has built a half-finished cabin, and the villains in both films die shortly after getting the Dead Man’s Hand of aces and eights in a poker game. Ford’s 1956 The Searchers famously opens with a shot of the wide, open spaces of western Texas (actually, Arizona) framed by the darkness surrounding a doorway of a cabin interior and ends with the same framing of the Indian-hating protagonist Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) walking away, unable to participate in the bliss of domestic life. Almost unique in Ford’s oeuvre, Liberty Valance remains claustrophobic, virtually without exterior shots. The black-and-white film is shot in a German Expressionist kammerspiel fashion – dark interiors, irregular angles, no landscape vistas. See Matheson 2012:363-64; Barr 2011:162-179. A frequent criticism of Liberty Valance is that most of the actors – especially, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne – seem to be 10-20 years too old for their parts. “Ford’s detractors found this to be the limit of absurdity, as if the old man had slipped into dotage. But we are not seeing the characters as they were in the past.… They are the people of the film’s present projected back into the past, acting out its fateful moments but incapable of altering them.” McBride and Wilmington 1988:178. The staging is ‘artificial’ with a ‘theatrical’ feeling. The dialogue also seems ‘stagey.’ My view is that Ford consciously made Liberty Valance as a parable. It is supposed to be ‘unrealistic.’ Everything is exaggerated, larger than life – from the caricatured sets to John Wayne’s ten-gallon hat to the enormous steaks served up at the restaurant, Peter’s Place. This is as close as Ford ever gets to Verfremdung techniques. 4 For an interesting interpretation of Ford’s increasingly dark films in a law and literature con- text, see Böhnke 2001. 5 To mention just a few: Koch 2008 (Platonic interpretation), Livingston 2009 (Straussian/ Lockeian perspective), O’Neill 2004 (utilizing Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty). Russell L Dees 59 could not have had any influence on John Ford; nor can I find any evidence that Arendt saw John Ford’s film as she was composing her book. Nevertheless, the ideas Arendt was developing resonate with the message of the film in ways that enrich our understanding of both and clarify the relevance of the film in a law and literature context. Thus, an Arendtian approach provides new insights into the message of the film, and the film provides concrete illustrations of concepts developed by Arendt in her writings. Hannah Arendt’s political theory A crucial element in Hannah Arendt’s political theory6 is that she revitalizes – some would say, idealizes – the ancient Greek concept of the polis in her definition of the ‘political’. The word polis usually gets translated into English as ‘city-state’, but that does not quite catch the full meaning of the term.7 Aristotle famously called man ‘a political animal’ by which he meant that what it means to be a human being is to be a part of a polis, part of a specific kind of community of human beings. And one of the fundamental things that make man a ‘political animal’ is that he alone possesses speech – that he is capable of communicating with his fellow creatures to form a community. Anyone who is either incapable of participating in such a community or is self-sufficient and needs no community to “live well” Aristotle says is “either a beast or a god” (Politics 1253a29). What it means to live in a polis is to live as a community in accordance with the rules we have imposed upon ourselves. For Arendt, this is the essence of the ‘political’ – what she calls the public realm, which is (in her view) the realm of freedom.8 This is where politics takes place. In the public realm, we meet (as equals) to debate how we as a community should realize the conception of some public good we can agree upon. The realm of necessity is the oikos, the household, the private sphere, where we are engaged in whatever we have to do to sustain ourselves physically – literally, the oikos is where economics is relevant. The ancient Greeks, Arendt says, kept these two spheres separate; and, by mixing them up – mixing the private up with the political, the Modern Age has gone terribly wrong. 6 My exposition of Hannah Arendt’s ideas is necessarily tentative and incomplete. As Marie Luise Knott has recently said, “Arendt’s texts are inexhaustible; they unfold more and more with each new reading. One suspects that as our present becomes ever more distant from the historical circumstances that originally gave rise to her thought, Arendt’s works will turn out to have new and quite different things to say to us.” Knott 2011:xiii. On Hannah Arendt’s life and thought generally, see Young-Breuhl 1982. See also Bernstein 2011. 7 See, for example, Hansen 2006 and Kitto 2009:64-79 on the polis.